The ones left behind
by drawingdisaster
Summary: The blonde knight riddled with guilt for his uselessness run away from his teammates and friends after he learned of Pyrrha's death during the fall of Beacon. Blake did the same to protect team RWBY from Adam. The two meet again three years later, but they are not the same people anymore.


The two old acquaintances happen to cross paths while waiting for a Bullhead departure near the suburbs of the kingdom of Vacuo. Blake is now missing one of her Faunus ears, half of Jaune's face is scarred by Cinder's terrible flames. Husks of their former youthful selves and while being constantly tormented by their own personal demons, the two old aquintances merelly spare each other a fleeting glance before picking a seat at opposite corners of the crowded Bullhead bay.

Exotic amber eyes remain vacant and unblinking at all times. An unruly mop of messy blonde hair dip down in exhaustion following the hunched posture of their impossibly bitter owner, Jaune Arc, almost dragging across the waiting room's dusty floor due to the fake Huntsman's lethargic actions. The seconds keep ticking by, minutes expiring like human and Faunus lives lost in the claws of the Creatures of Grimm. Passengers cough and shift or walk about impatiently. Bullheads crawl out of their respective hangars as others touchdown, hurried footsteps clanking, reverberating across the buzzing walls of the cramped hot waiting room. The lazy spinning of a few antique fans hanging by the cream-colored ceiling attempting to disperse the extreme heat of the harsh Vacuan climate even as dehydrated civilians and sweaty Huntsmen alike wet their lips with dry tongues and wipe sweat beads off their glistering creased eyebrows with obvious irritation.

The hours fade like the retreating sunlight. Hundreds of exhausted slumping bodies gradually vacate the languid waiting room. And yet Jaune and Blake still remain seated, like solemn, aged statues. Like remnants of some miserable long-forgotten past. One without a home, the other without a goal, both of them lacking a purpose or the shred of a doomed, vain hope in what unbearable burden they now called their everyday lives.

Like the two opposite poles of slowly approaching magnets the empty gazes of the nearly catatonic former classmates seem to be attracted to each other under the soft buzzing glow of the waiting room's artificial lighting. The fleshy worn masks of the two old acquaintances regard each other with disinterest and boredom, facial muscles made out of breathing cold lead.

Jaune doesn't crack a smile. Blake doesnt offer one of her once expected polite nods. The two had never been close after all, just friends of friends and names noted in the reaches of naive teenage minds. And then those very minds were exposed to loss, grief, despair and tragedy, groveled in death and black blood. The innocence of youth had bled out of utterly shattered hearts and pupils etched with festering dark hatred…

And so here those two were, three years after the fall of Beacon Academy. Jaune and Blake, Belladona and Arc, two peas in a pond if the figurative pond was made out of guilt and pure scorching heartache.

Deceivers and cowards those two were, one fleeing from her morals, her feelings, her fights and her responsibilities, the other one from reality or at least the nightmare that had swiftly replaced it after Pyrrha's untimely death.

More seconds, minutes and hours pass by as the lone moments huddle together and multiply in silence. Announcements of Bullheads arriving and then departing ring on deaf ears as the waiting room fills with new people only to empty once again. The two former Beacon students remain seated, however. Frozen in time as they are in life. Glancing at each other with eyes that blink and occasioanly wander about, but definitely can't see the present and merely linger in the not-so-distant past. Two broken hearts, stomped and abused, longing to be made whole again, to be picked up from the floor, to be shielded and mended.

Blake is the first one to eventually walk out of the deserted Bullhead bay with her head hang low and her shoulder blades bent forward by the weight of her terrible guilt. Jaune spares her a disappointed glance, lowers his head until his chin touches his battered breastplate and proceeds to replay Pyrrha's last video recording on the scratched scroll that's being choked in the defeated blonde knight's blackened burnt grasp. The voice of a ghost finds its way into the ears of a dead man. Jaune smiles miserably.


End file.
